HOMEPAGENEWSPAPER ARCHIVE
by Elizabeth Fernandez, Stephanie Salter and Dennis J. Opatrny, San Francisco Examiner, August 3, 1995
The report evaluates the worth and the "highest and best use" of 25 San Francisco churches and parish complexes. In one case, it describes the "highest use" of the now-closed St. Brigid's Church in Pacific Heights as "maximum density" and "mixed medium density" residential housing.
"This is the straw that broke the camel's back," said San Francisco attorney Robert Bryan, who has led an ongoing parishioner appeal tore open St. Brigid's Church.
"It's clear the archbishop and his staff lied to parishioners about the reasons for closing the churches," he said. "Their plan was to shut down houses of God to reap financial profit. This report documents what was very obvious."
St. Brigid was one of the church properties evaluated in a 160-page report, dated Nov. 15,1993 - the same day most San Francisco Catholics began to hear which parishes and churches had been recommended for closing.
The archdiocese said then - and still maintains - that changing demographics, a decline in Mass attendance and the high cost of mandatory seismic retrofitting, not a desire to make money from sold church properties, dictated closure choices.
The worth of four of St. Brigid's buildings and land was estimated as high as $16.6 million in the report.
Prepared over several weeks by a six-person volunteer task force of real estate professionals, the report was submitted, in confidence, to the Archbishop's Pastoral Planning Commission, a 13-member group charged with recommending the controversial closings.
One of three copies of the report kept in the archdiocese chancery office recently was "stolen," according to the Rev. Bob McElroy, and was leaked to the public.
"We have some idea who took it," he said. "It is very disappointing."
But McElroy insisted the report had not influenced church officials in their decision to close parishes.
"There's nothing to hide in this document," he said.
"Like a loaded gun"
The 1993 property evaluations were part of a two-pronged research effort by the archdiocese to address what looked at the time like $70-120 million in seismic retrofitting costs, mandated by new city laws, for many diocesan buildings, said McElroy.
"We were facing these huge potential costs; it was like a loaded gun to our head," he said. "One of the studies was to look at the UMB(unreinforced masonry building) parishes and come up with an idea of how much each could raise, a way to see if the parishes could cannibalize their own assets (to fund retrofitting). This is precisely what St. Paul's has done."
Initially slated for closure, St. Paul's Parish in Noe Valley won a reprieve from the hit list and recently sold its high school and primary school buildings to help defray an estimated $6 million retrofitting tab.
Evaluations of non-UMB parishes came after the recommended closings, said McElroy, pointing to Nov. 4, Nov. 15 and Dec. 14 submission dates on property evaluations of four closed or merged parishes: Nativity, All Hallows, St. Thomas More and St. Michael.
"The planning commission members made their final decisions (about recommended closings) at a retreat in late October, two weeks before the report was submitted," he said.
Also, McElroy said, the total estimated value of $43 million for all 31 properties was misleading and hardly represented money in hand for the archdiocese.
"Take St. Brigid's. The site of the church itself is estimated at more than $7 million," McElroy said. "But there is no way in the world The City is going to issue a demolition permit for St. Brigid's Church. No one I've talked to thinks that. . . . I think if the archdiocese ever gets $700 out of that building, I'd be surprised."
As for the confidentiality of the report, McElroy said that that was necessary at first to aid the planning commission in its complex task of dealing with the UMB parishes; later, it simply made good business sense.
"If we were going to go out and market those properties (after the closure announcements were made), we wouldn't want people to know what our appraisals were," he said.
However, news of the real estate report landed hard on former parishioners of closed churches.
"There was an understanding that there were no ulterior motives, that (the closures of churches) had nothing to do with economics," said John Ravnik, a former member of the Slovenian-Croatian Church of the Nativity. "The parishioners were skeptical, and now their skepticism seems confirmed, that it was primarily for money that the churches were closed."
Nativity was one of nine churches that were suppressed or closed by the archdiocese.
Members of The Catacombs, a group from several of the closed churches, said Wednesday that the report demanded a full accounting and could aid their appeals to the Vatican for reversal of the closings.
Inarguably, the report - given to The Examiner by the archdiocese -provides a rare glimpse at many of the church's vast and valuable San Francisco real estate holdings and their potential. The church's private corporate status protects it from public disclosure of such information.
For example, St. Paul's church, three schools, two convents and a rectory were given a highest-range evaluation of about $8 million. Highest and best use of parish properties included demolishing the neo-Gothic church, creating housing on the site and converting the 8,000-square-foot rectory into an apartment building.
The Apostleship of the Sea, located on Rincon Hill and closed just last month, was given an estimated potential value of $1.9 million-$2.2 million. St. Thomas More at 1300 Junipero Serra Blvd., closed in July 1994, carried a potential value range of $5.5-$6.1 million.
In contrast, the small Church of the Nativity, at 260 Fell St., garnered an estimated price range of $600,000-$800,000. The task force saw the highest and best use of its non-UMB church building and rectory in a conversion "to a residential-commercial use similar to a live / work type development."
HOMEPAGE